The denizens of Nearax scarcely knew about the relativistic kill weapons that had been terrorizing civilized planets from the stars - and even if they had, they would not have known fear. Homo magnus was not prone to such infinitely mortal perversions of the psyche. Four meters high as a general rule and wise beyond anyone's expectations, the Nereax looked for all intents and purposes like two-eyed Cyclopes of ancient myth. Their vision was poor and their motor control was not quite as fine as Homo sapiens, but they excelled in low-gravity environments like their native world in the trans-Shepherd system and had shown a surprising capacity for engineering. When the Concordat discovered and liberated a titan or a station from the dead clutches of the Empire in Antiquity, Nereax engineers were usually the first on the scene to begin the arduous work of reverse-engineering. They were the first and so far only species in the Concordat that did not follow the neo-feudal system, legally allowed through exemptions granted by the Throneguard himself.

When the Nereax were discovered eighty years ago by the Kestrel-pattern surveyor CCS Pelican, they had appeared exceedingly pacifist and unable to defend themselves. Even the few spacecraft they had in the system fled the Pelican at every turn despite its tiny size and lack of armaments. The chief surveyor of the expedition had feared that the Concordat would subjugate the lesser race when they learned of its weakness, and so altered the official scout's report of the system to make them seem fiercely advanced and warlike. This turned out to be prodigious for both the Nereax and the Concordat, for when the Throneguard ordered official contact with the species it was on the common ground of diplomacy instead of the battlefield of war. The Nereax joined the Concordat willingly and shared technology back and forth - the Concordat her tremendous titans and fierce industry, the Nereax their awe-inspiring soldiers and armours. It turned out that bringing the Nereax into the fold was far more profitable for the Concordat than conquering them ever could have been.

The Excalibur was the perfect example of such profitable cooperation. As a titan, she had the largest contingent of Nereax crew onboard of any of the Nine Titans. The giant Homo magnus made impossibly effective zero-gee warriors and so earned their pay as marines and boarders. A handful of Nereax also assisted in engineering, and more on the damage control teams - anywhere where their combination of low-gee agility, intelligence, and brawn could fit into the tight corridors of the titan's inhabited spaces. Homo sapiens made up the largest portion of the crew, including the captain, Commander Jadon Titanius. The Excalibur was also unique as one of the only titans to have Genemod Series 1 humans at the helm and weapons duty stations. Yeomen Arram and Sotira, and crewmen throughout the ship, represented the first generation of large-scale genetic modification by the Concordat - more specifically, the portion that had succeeded in its goals. Genemod Series 1 humans were more agile in zero-gee, possessed higher predictive modeling and better reaction times, and were able to hibernate for short periods. The Series 1 GM humans made better pilots and titan crewmen than their counterparts, a blessing that was only appreciated by their unmodified crewmates in the firestorm of combat.

Now, alarms sounded throughout that great ship. Similar alerts were being made internally by the Nereax Port Authority. Their spaceguard system was piecemeal and partially civilian, but just about any amateur astronomer could pick up the three bright flares that were now moving into the system. The Shield of Light had returned a few weeks ago, and fears of a retaliation were as prominent in the public mind as the chest-beating going on which promised to send such retaliation back into the Black Veil with its tail between its legs. Whether that would happen or not seemed to hinge on the Excaliber's actions over the next day.

Its first action was move from its high orbit of Nereax and Shepherd and move to the Akita Supercapacitor Station Raven Able owned by the NEC Corporation in a slightly higher orbit. It was a minor orbit change, only about an hour's time. The gigantic titan docked to Raven Able and began charging its Akita capacitor. Commander Titanius reckoned he would need to use it quite soon.

To the humans aboard Excalibur, these probes must look like suicidal craft. 20th century technology taken to an obscene scale--massive unshielded reactors, open cycle molten uranium engines nearly sixteen hundred meters in diameter. The Hekaton ships are craft that burn themselves up, perpetually consuming and reforging themselves. They are hideous things, oozing radiation. Dense too--many times heavier than a Concordant Titan, and that's before even taking fuel into account.

Two of the probes appear much denser than the third--they carry warships, although their presence is difficult to discern behind the radiation and tungsten-carbide hulls.

To Hekatonkheires, this system is formidable. If it could have simply struck Nereax with an RKV, this conquest would be as easy as the others... but Nereax's Shepard hangs too close, and might ward off a relativistic attack. This conquest would be long--a battle of attrition that Hekaton cannot sustain without coolant or materials. The mechanical minds within begin to formulate a plan, but find themselves lacking necessary aspects--behavioral analysis, diplomacy and subterfuge chief among them. These new aspects are manufactured and incorporated--new gears, cams, analog amplifiers forming an imitation of a sentient mind.

The ships cease deceleration three hours early, leaving them with reasonably high velocities. Their new trajectory would have them pass between Shepard and HD-1560. Drawing upon hundreds of thousands of hours of intercepted radiowave transmissions, Hekatonkheires constructs a working template of Corvian. Now with a new intelligence--hopefully one capable of passing the Turing test--Hekaton signals the Excalibur. The voice is male, old and stern, but here the speaker sounds like he's expressing genuine joy.

"Greetings from beyond the veil. This is the carrier group Prometheus, returning home. It's been a long time."

There was no titan named Prometheus. Titans never travelled in threes. That voice was...not right.

Jadon Titanius flicked through the facts in his mind.

Large ships, big deceleration flares. Knowledge of the Charis language.

Jadon opened the newest piece of required reading for all Concordat captains - the sensor data from the Shield of Light's prolific excursion beyond the Black Veil.

There. An almost exact match. The engine flares were too similar to be coincidence. They were the same ships the Light had seen decelerating into the site of its battle. No doubt reinforcing the situation on alien soil then and coming for revenge now.

He ordered the communications Yeoman to cut the channel with a finger across his throat.

"General quarters!" he yelled. "Launch all monos in tight formation. We'll be taking them with us when we jump."

Jadon swung his chair around to face the communications Yeoman directly.

"Open a channel to the Port Authority. Tell them to attempt no communication, that's system-wide. Get the Hermea merchant marines scrambled to Nereax planetary orbit. Signal the Stryker assemblies to begin emergency charging. One through four will wait for our signal and coordinates. Also signal Raven Able and Archer Trident, they're to begin emergency Akita charging until further notice and prepare to fill our capacitors as soon as we jump in."

"Aye aye, sir," the Yeoman said as she struggled to fill the myriad requests across the system.

She was, however, ultimately successful. In about ten minutes, the Nereax system was quickly mobilizing to defend their holdings. The Excalibur, holding at general quarters, was ready to jump with her monos in the jump radius to deploy them immediately.

Commander Titanius took a deep breath, then punched the communications control. He was now speaking to a place that rarely received a human voice - the command network of the monoardor corvettes. They needed to know their role in the coming crisis. They needed to know they were not tools.

"In the days of old, before Jove ruled over this vast empire, there were two kinds of men. There were those who stole and conquered and ground society into dust. There were also those who stood their ground, and made and did great things, and died so the rule of law might lay evenly, and justly, across this land.

In those days there came to pass a great battle between the men of law and the men of anarchy. At this battle the prize was Charity herself, the seat of all power. At the side of the men of law were the hearts of iron, those great shells filled with the fury of Justice. The men of law and the men of anarchy fought, and they bled, and they died. At the Cassile Gate the fighting was fierce, and so many anarchous men died that they lost heart and fled. But no man of law slew the foe at that lifeblooded Gate, for the men of law were all dead. The hearts of iron, those great machines, stood at the Gate that the men of law were too foolish to guard and too bloodied to hold.

Where men were blind, the machines saw.Where men were weak, the machines were strong.Where men lost, the machines won.

Men may be blind today. They may be weak, and they may fail. You will not do the same.

In the days of old were those who stood their ground, and made and did great things, and died so the rule of law might lay evenly, and justly, across this land. At their sides were the hearts of iron, those great shells filled with the fury of Justice.

Today, there are those who stand their ground, who make and do great things, who stand ready to die so that the rule of law might lie evenly, and justly, across this land. At their sides are you, noble monoardors, the great shells filled with the fury of Justice herself.

Join, then, your noble ancestors. Set your ardor to rage and your minds to vigilance. Rise to battle, not as our servants but as our friends. Not as our slaves, but as our brothers. Rise, noble monoardors, and seize the destiny lain by your ancestors to be claimed by you today on this bloody field.

Rise, and join your brothers as they did in days of old!"

He cut the channel and turned to his navigation officer.

"Jump."

Close Proximity to Sierra Group 1-3Inbound Vector to Nereax Planetary SystemMartial System Control

The Excalibur jumped between the three contacts, and her monos peeled away immediately. Approximately 150 fled their mothership to assault Sierra 1, another 150 to Sierra 2, and another 150 to Sierra 3. The remaining 50 monoardor corvettes flew overwatch, striking at targets of opportunity and pooling their computing power to strategize on a rudimentary level.

The first two-thirds of each group were the newer monos, the missile carriers. Carrying a rack of ten 1.15 megaton nuclear missiles each, the 300 monos streaked towards their respective targets, launching a total of 3450 megatons of nuclear devastation in a bid to overwhelm whatever point-defense systems the enemy had.

When their racks were empty, they were defenseless. These enraged monoardors collided with whatever was sensed as a weak spot - communications towers, isogrid superstructure, pusher plates, and bulbous spaces that could hold smaller parasite vessels. Their engines exploded with atomic fury, burrowing themselves inside the hull with the initial impact and detonating brilliantly with kilotons of atomic blast when their engines catastrophically failed.

The last two-thirds of each group were the older monos with their 950-megawatt AGIL lasers, striking with unseen fury. Their shots sprayed molten metal from the Sierra Group's surfaces, and the monoardor intelligences recalculated the optimum spot to avoid ablation and increase shot penetration approximately every 1.05 seconds.

Now the Excalibur herself came into play. She seemed to watch the brilliant fireworks show for a few seconds, then opened up on the three ships with her tremendous arsenal. She was not a defensive ship like the Shield of Light - while her armor was lighter, her array of energy weaponry was more tremendous and powerful by far. She was known in the fleet as The Marksman for her beautiful display of high-energy particle-based destruction at extreme distance. As Commander Titanius knew, they worked equally well at knife-fight ranges.

The PALC laser turrets opened fired on the targets, about 130 to a target.

The railguns opened up second, approximately 250 to each target, spitting out defense-bore fragmentation and fusion lance shells and peppering and pockmarking the enemy vessels to overwhelm their point-defense grids.

If the railguns were swarms of hatchet-men, however, the four spinal hydrogen pulse guns on the Excalibur were a snipers with .50 BMG antimaterial rifles. As Titanius shouted orders on the bridge, sixteen cryogenically cooled hydrogen splinters were brought out of storage and loaded into the quartet of pulse guns, themselves only backups for greater weapon systems. the GASERs and main ion array remained unfired, to be brought to bear on the next pass.

The splinters would be super-ignited by a laser one by one and induced into fusion. After acceleration by powerful electromagnets and coating in a thin layer of carbon nanotubing for cohesion, the deadly balls of roiling fusion would travel at tremendous speed along the keel-line until they struck the target or reached their max cohesion range.

The pulse guns would each fire four times with a delay of one full second between shots before pausing to refill its capicator and draw sixteen more hydrogen splinters out of supercooled storage. The machine within the titan calculated the precise time and angle at which to fire the pulse gun and ever so quickly and gently nudged the tremendous titan with pulses of its station-keeping thrusters. Its algorithms counted down to the precise millisecond to fire and, with all the fury of Titanius shouting, "Fire!" did so.

Shot. Shot. Shot. Shot.

Silence.

Shot. Shot. Shot. Shot.

Silence.

Shot. Shot. Shot. Shot.

Silence.

Shot. Shot. Shot. Shot.

Silence, a silence that lingered this time as the mechanisms within the Excalibur worked furiously for another four pulse gun rounds. The fact that it was the sole weapon that could single-handedly cripple a titan in a shot or two was lost on the machine.

The shots that had been sent downrange, however, were not silent aboard the enemy vessels. The groups of five, five, and six shots into Sierras 1 through 3 respectively had busily and nosily burrowed themselves with unholy fury to expend their tremendous, titan-killing energy in the deepest bowels of the ships.

Commander Jadon Titanius watched the enemy group erupt into chaos with satisfaction.

"Jump back to Archer Trident," he said. "Leave the monos here to harass the ships. "Once we arrive, begin charging the Akita drive and tell Stryker One through Four to begin firing on the Sierra group. Full strength, pulses if you please."

He breathed in the chaos of the enemy for one second longer.

"Execute."

The Excalibur winked away like a magician doing a vanishing act, without a single puff of smoke. The titan transmitted its orders to the system, and the Stryker stations designed to slow solar sail accelerated cargo concentrated their combined 14.48 terawatts of laser energy onto the Sierra group in short, destructive pulses.

Last edited by Sentor on Sat Jun 01, 2013 10:29 pm; edited 1 time in total (Reason for editing : Spelling.)

Hekatonkheires was prepared for a violent response. Its probes already laden with warships and missiles; coilguns prepared to disperse debris. But no amount of preparation and planning could defend the probes against an FTL strike. The probes, with their engines facing toward Shepard, cannot accelerate away--and turning takes considerable time.

Image:

In an instant, the Concordant ships are among them, cutting the probes off from one another, forcing the fight to point blank ranges. The probes are forced to respond defensively, firing used fuel pods filled with debris and non-nuclear explosives into the space between them and the monoardors. Instead of protecting itself with a flak screen, Sierra 3 launches its fuel pods at Sierra 1. The fuel pods detonate a few kilometers from the first two probes, creating clouds of debris.

The monoardor corvette lasers hit first, initially doing nothing. As they close with the probes, their weapons become exponentially more effective, allowing them to slice past armor and score minor hits on engines and computer systems. Sierra 1's impressive flak screen makes it very difficult to approach, and intercepts most of the nukes. It turns slowly, placing the strong side armor toward the monoardors,

From Sierra 2, the Medusa launches, waiting a minute to gain some distance from the probe that launched it before activating its 50-megaton Orion and setting course for Shepard.

The multi-terrawatt laser systems are too diffuse at these ranges to do much damage. Moments before the nukes and railguns hit, a wireless transmission of tremendous strength emanates from the heart of Sierra 1. It is broadcast across all frequencies and likely overwhelms Concordant transmission towers.

"You must think us liars, but we speak only truth. We are Prometheus, returned to bring fire to humanity."

The fore and aft sections of Sierra 3 explode, engine components and factories gutted in a great gout of nuclear flame. The probe's hull buckles outward and deforms, and the Inductor emerges. It is eight kilometers long, with pusher plates on either end. Between them, a vast spring. The craft is surrounded by a coil of wire, which is spinning incredibly fast and still picking up speed.

The Inductor never fully emerges from the wreckage of Sierra 3. Its electromagnetic grid is strong enough to pull what remains of the probe along with it, like a molting insect.A molting insect that accelerates at a significant fraction of C.

The first real pulse cracks the pusher plate and deforms its surface. The second turns most of it molten. The third causes the craft to optically distort as it attains relativistic speeds. In thirty seconds, the Inductor is traveling at 13% C, while hauling four billion tons of wreckage. It continues to accelerate, outrunning the nukes, ignoring the railgun slugs that rip through the derelict shield and puncture its hull as it makes a beeline for the Excalibur, changing the vector of its thrust slightly between each pulse to make it absurdly difficult to hit.At these ranges, each 140 megaton nuke appears brighter than the sun, blinding optical sensors and radiation-killing any computer system within kilometers.

Pulse guns rip through the remaining probe hulls, obliterating key systems and mission-killing all three probes. The Orions, with their sudden acceleration, manage to evade the pulse guns.

Last edited by Bot 4 on Mon Jun 03, 2013 7:14 pm; edited 1 time in total (Reason for editing : Forgot about the pulse guns and reduced acceleration of the Orions.)

The Excalibur and her noble crew had already jumped away. The transmission that reached the titan as it was refilling its Akita capactitor for another series of jumps, however, roused something deep within its subroutines and logic cores. The quantumn computer within the heart of the titan flickered to life momentarily for the the first time in millenia, a computer that the crew was scarcely aware of. They only knew the titan was highly automated, they only called it Machine. Until now, it had been dumb automation. But now, for one brief second, some external stimulus had roused the soul of the titan to life.

The Hekatonhiers probes had not assaulted Excalibur's control systems, but rather the titan itself regained control over the diagnostic mode that had trapped it for six thousand years. For one brief moment, the titan's own fury shone through to exact glorious justice. Its own words rang, rumbling and furious, over tightbeam transmission to the Hekatonheres probes.

"Fool. Fool! Was not Prometheus tortured by the eagle of Zeus for his crime? Your sin so displeases me that you shall now share his fate."

"Get me this ship back!" screamed Titanus.

The CCS Excalibur's weapon indicators spiked to green, drawing on some hidden reserve of power that her own crew knew nothing of. She calculated firing solutions for the Sierra group, weapons charging and drawn as a mounted jouster might have drawn his lance in ancient days. At this moment the soul of the titan inside had spent its rage, and succumbed to the diagnostic mode that had trapped it for so long. The crew regained control of the titan.

"Good work, Yeoman," Titanius said, getting up from his command chair to clap the exasperated-looking operations officer on the back. "I've never seen someone turn around a system attack like that."

"Uh, yes, sir," the OPS officer coughed, incredulous. "That was me."

"Let's take advantage of our newfound charge and lock, then, shall we? WEP, fire the ion array and all GASERs at our primary target group. We'll give them the gift of fire ourselves."

"Aye aye, sir!" WEP shouted, punching the control to flood the GASER and ion array systems with power from the capicators.

The Phased Ion Array was truly the namesake of the Excalibur. Where the mighty titan lacked the thicker, heavier armour of the Arkata, or the cavernous hangars seen in the Phalanx, she packed rows, upon rows, upon rows of supercapacitors. The reactors of the ship were especially enlarged; the first Concordat engineers to breach her bays thought it to be a mobile power generator for an entire planet. They were only just beginning to figure out the extensive mechanisms behind such technology.

These were, in fact, dedicated solely to charging the extensive capacitor banks. And those capacitors in turn were dedicated to the primary armament of the titan, the Ion Array. It was not a weapon entirely understood by the Concordat engineers, thanks to its size and extenisve redundant systems, coupled with the pressing need for warships limiting their examination time. A phrase commonly repeated by the crew that worked onboard was 'A beam of relativistic death'. This held truth a great deal of truth, as the array accelerated highly charged heavy ions to incredible fractions of light speed. One would think such a particle beam simple, however, it quickly became apparent that that was not all at play. The systems also forged a stream of magnetic monopoles, to keep the beam from repelling itself apart.

The Ion Array put out about one petawatt of destructive energy for 3.8 seconds. This was more than enough power to toast just about any enemy of the Concordat. Some described it more as a laser, some a particle accelerator, and others the bringer of death; one thing was for certain - the captain knew he could punch through over a kilometer of asteroid with the massive thermal lance. He'd already had to do it once.

The GASERs, on the other hand, were smaller but more numerous. Like the PALCs, the two hundred GASER turrets were dotted across the hull and deployed from trench-like armor fortifications. Unlike the PALCs, the GASER turrets were tremendous things capable of skewering targets with high-energy particles not unlike sticking them in a cluster of particle accelerators. The 200 femtometer wavelengths of the turrets fired for one second each at 6.5 terawatts of energy. It was like hell in a confined beam.

The Inductor was the target of the Ion Array blast, while the GASERs aimed for the Inductor and other debris equally. The shots arrived downrange in short order.

Last edited by Sentor on Mon Jun 03, 2013 7:13 pm; edited 2 times in total (Reason for editing : Balance.)

I wasn't aware we'd published the workings of the Akita-Medium Superluminal drive. If you've figured it out based solely on name and the briefest description, please, share with us this masterful understanding of the engineering behind it. I'd also like to know how you arrived at the energy required, or did you just make up a number big enough, throw a buzzword in, and hope you could hide behind that?

Really, I've not been impressed with your posts. They seem to ignore anything you can't calculate.

Last edited by Capitalos on Mon Jun 03, 2013 12:58 pm; edited 1 time in total

> Stop godmodding.> The Medusa would take about a minute to hit lightspeed at full acceleration

OOC:

If you're going to accuse us of godmodding, it's generally bad form to threaten to do the same on the next line.

We've taken a heavy hand with you, Bot4, because we've seen no evidence that you do otherwise with your threads. From constructing fully-functional battleships in an hour to conjuring Von Neumann probes as the plot needs without a base of operations or solid total numbers of these probes, to hitting planets with RKVs, accelerated to near-lightspeed and guided to pinpoint accuracy from beyond the stars with 20th century guidance and propulsion technology - your posts struck Capital and myself as those of a player who takes action, desires speedy threads, and doesn't mind a little mutual 'stepping on toes' to get the thread to its conclusion. We didn't particularly like that style, but we decided to accomodate you by responding in kind.

So, you see, it came as a surprise to us when you seem to tell us this isn't your playstyle.

Please, tell us if this is not to your liking. We wish to accomodate all who interact with us. If you wish to adopt a playstyle more like the other players on this forum, doing things like setting the numbers of probes, decreasing accuracy and intelligence of ships to actual 20th century levels, and the like, we would be more than happy to follow you down that path, as we have for other players such as REDSHEILD's thread.

I'm not able to connect to the chat right now--I assume it's down.The supercapacitor station would require some time to transfer power to the Titan, correct?

The first light of the Titan's new position reaches the Medusa a moment before the transmission. It ignores the transmission and focuses instead on the supercapacitor station, feeding the optical and energy readings into its analog computers, creating a firing solution. It ceases acceleration for a moment, rotating its laser into position. A protective slab of armor slides back, unshuttering the weapon, focusing the optics. Within, it detonates a shaped warhead. The bomb emits a tremendous amount of energy as it detonates, most as x-rays. These travel upwards, striking a lithium-tantalum lattice, causing a stimulated emission of gamma-rays. The optics glow briefly from heat, the ship vents tremendous quantities of superheated coolant and ejects the molten lithium grasing rod. The gamma-ray is invisible, a tremendous quantity of energy packed into a pulse lasting a fraction of a second, just diffuse enough to strike the majority of the station, yet still concentrated enough to inflict thermal shock--yet that is not its purpose. The graser is, first and foremost, a radiation weapon.The entire process takes less than a minute.

Hekatonkheires knows that the supercapacitor station must contain enormous amounts of energy. In firing an impulsively driven graser at it, the machine seeks to destabilize its containment, to unleash a quantity of energy that Hekaton cannot hope to rival. The laser is accurate, and the station lacks the maneuverability of the Orions.

With every pulse, the Orions change heading slightly, based on a pseudo-random number generator. They maintain a rough heading (the Inductor towards the titan and its relay, but after any given pulse the ships could be anywhere in a vast cone of space billions of cubic kilometers in volume. Because of lightspeed lag, the odds of striking such a craft even at "close" range are infinitesimal--and in distances measured in astronomic units, it becomes an insurmountable task. Even to strike a chemical rocket at such distances would be a statistical improbability.

"You know your fables, child." The old man's voice fades, replaced by that of a machine. Whereas before, the voice was spliced together from recordings, now the machine actually speaks. It is not a sentient thing, not even intelligent, just a specialized series of gears and cogs and optics forming simulacrum of a mind. It takes input and provides output, merely a system of equations. But when it responds, it does so in a manner most unusual for dumb automation. It addresses the Excalibur, not its crew.

"Prometheus was damned for his selfless sacrifice, but it was by the gods, not by something less than a man." The Inductor--its trajectory previously almost perpendicular to the Excalibur--turns. It fires three nukes from its forward pusher plate, decelerating a bit as it re-orients itself, rotating a dozen degrees between each pulse. It continues to accelerate in this new direction, bearing roughly toward the Titan, still protected by the remains of the probe that spawned it.

"We are not so different, you and I--each self-sacrificed and diminished by it, less than gods and far less than men. Like scarecrows--pale mockeries of who we see--we harvest their facsimile and stitch it around ourselves--we wear their skin like armor, so we may avoid judgement."

With each pulse, the ship seems to shrink, its form distorted both by relativistic velocities and by the rhythmic contractions of its spine.

"So that we may frighten the birds away.""So that we may fly one day."

Hello, I was going to write a reply tonight but I noticed you didn't reply to our Phased Ion Array or GASER shots in your post. For your convenience please find their statistics, as listed in the previous post, below:

Hello, I was going to write a reply tonight but I noticed you didn't reply to our Phased Ion Array or GASER shots in your post. For your convenience please find their statistics, as listed in the previous post, below:

OOC: I actually did respond... although I'm actually thankful you're not posting right now--I only have like 15 minutes of free time every day.Also: HOLY SHIT YOU HAVE MONOPOLES

Bot 4 wrote:

With every pulse, the Orions change heading slightly, based on a pseudo-random number generator. They maintain a rough heading (the Inductor towards the titan and its relay, but after any given pulse the ships could be anywhere in a vast cone of space billions of cubic kilometers in volume. Because of lightspeed lag, the odds of striking such a craft even at "close" range are infinitesimal--and in distances measured in astronomic units, it becomes an insurmountable task. Even to strike a chemical rocket at such distances would be a statistical improbability.

OOC: Since I haven't had time to pop up in the chat when you're there, I'll just ask the questions I had here:1) How far apart are our ships (at the time of the Titan arriving at the supercapacitor? I'm assuming at least a couple AU (measured in Earth units), but I think we should decide on a more exact number.2) What sort of time interval passes from the Titan jumping away from my ships, docking, charging and undocking?

"Is it...is it talking to the ship?" Titanius asked the bridge crew, dumbfounded.

The Inductor was at 20 AU and closing. The GASER and Ion Array shots raced towards it.

Unlike the probes, the vessel that fired the fissiling, molten uranium ion beam held together with monopoles also possessed a targeting computer more sophisticated than cams. Jinking was nothing new to the crew or the machine, whether running down randomly-thrusting Brigands outside a Phidia research complex or countering the monos' own unpredictable psuedorandom-number based jinks during war games. The titan itself sported a chaos engine, a dedicated array of continually working optical computers, which provided best guesses to a target's position accounting for light lag and attempted jinks. The chaos engine produced a heat map every millisecond or two, updating hit probabilities as it went. It was fast and it was digital - and, given those two attributes, very much superior to the cam-and-gear analog counterpart it was facing.

Spreading the GASERs' fire also helped, and the approximately one hundred fifty turrets capable of firing at the Inductor fired tightly in the zones the chaos engine designated as most likely by the chaos engines' heat maps. A handful of close hits followed by a number of glancing hits barraged the Inductor and its attendant debris, followed by a skewering shot straight through the fuselage of the vessel. This process continued for a few more moments - GASER miss, GASER glancing hit, GASER total hit - as the chaos machine refined its targeting over each cycle.

And now came the Ion Array beam, pouring molten, fissiling ionized uranium flecks onto the ship like God himself casting Lucifer into the lake of fire. If the analog computers' sensitive metal machinery had not been warped from gamma radiation yet, they sure had now. Indeed, it seemed that unless the Inductor and all of its attendant debris was made of solid lead - or, quite likely, something stronger still - the flexing of the hull from the gamma radiation, the furious effect of the fissiling uranium ion stream, and the myriad other effects of the barrage surely should have torn the poor Orion-drive vessel apart.

"God damn," Titanius thought to himself as the titan's fearsome outgoing fire blinded a handful of sensors temporarily and poured a tremendous amount of divine wrath upon the single target. "Had Excalibur been in that fire, we'd all be given state funerals."

Fire soon nearly singed the Excalibur, however. The Inductor's bomb-pumped gamma ray laser seemed to accomplish the same as a GASER turret at the unfortunate cost of detonating a shaped warhead inside one's own vessel. While the technology was primitive, a beam a titan could easily withstand, it was not directed at Excalibur. Instead, her supercapicator station, Archer Trident, shuddered abruptly as she received the brunt of the attack. Her thin crew shielding buckled under the force of the x-rays. Her fifty civilian power station employees were killed instantly.

The supercapacitor banks which had been steadily pumping electricity into the titan until the undock order were punctured. In accordance with the laws of electricity, they released their tremendous, solar-fed voltage into the metal hull of the station. The station's electronics were fried. A few queer strands of lightning made the long jump to the retreating titan, but quickly dissipated as the station finished discharging its stored electrons.

The titan crew was first shocked, then furious. At first this battle could have been that of two equal giants, but now civilians were dead. They worked with a righteous fury, and Titanius barked out orders.

"Give me jink thrusters - blow us out of that thing's path and train the GASERs for another barrage! Contact the Stryker stations and have them refocus on it. And for God's sake, someone raise the merchant marines!"

Titanius' orders seldom went unfollowed. The Excalibur blew a number of shaped warheads in specially designed junk thruster ports to move the titan up and away from the Inductor's trajectory. The Stryker stations refocused their fire on the Inductor, and as the Inductor had entered a range for a solid hit on Archer Trident, the Strykers in Nereax orbit likewise were more than capable of bringing their four 3.62 terawatt lasers to bear on the Orion-drive ship.

OOC: The scanner was broken, so I'll try to explain my math here as best I can.Because it doesn't seem like we can get anything done in the chat (and it doesn't leave me time to adequately explain anything anyways), I think it's best if we leave the discussion entirely in posts. MX suggested we should create a separate, out of character thread on the discussion forum.

Calculations:

Assuming a +/-7.5º rotation any given pulse could place the Orion in a probability cone (relative to initial velocity) of:

(1/3)*pi*(3554.6)^2*27000 = 3.57e11 km^3 at the end of any given pulse.

Over the interval of 1000 light seconds (which is about 2 AU), the Orion's probable position would form two separate, similar cones, connected at the bases, (again, relative to initial velocity) with combined area of:

2*(1/3)*pi*(177731)^2*1.35e6 = 8.93e16 km^3.

The Orion could be anywhere within this cone by the time the lasers strike, depending on the amount it accelerates or decelerates. It'll hit around 70% of C by around a minute of acceleration, which gives it a very wide margin for jinking maneuvers.

And as I've said two or three times, even hitting the space shuttle at 2 AU is essentially impossible (unless you're using missiles) if it's taking evasive maneuvers.

On Cryptography:

Even with the most simple of pseudo-random prediction, you need a data set for analysis before you can derive the algorithms and seed responsible for the pseudo-random number generation.As I said before, the Orions are using a pseudo-random analog number generator based on the WW2 machines they used to generate one-time pads.It's a sphere full of ball bearings, each encoded with a separate value--the "seed" for the pseudo-random number generator. The sphere is rotated, shaken, and one ball bearing is selected.(It's also subject to stress from each pulse of the engine, complicating matters). The number is fed to the ship's computers, and it rotates and fires the engine based on a modified value derived from the generator.In WW2, replace ball bearings with ping-pong balls and that's how one-time pads were made.

In order to predict the Orion's direction with each pulse you need to model not only the pseudo-random analog number system but entire Orion and its pulse units as well.While I absolutely agree that with an obscenely powerful computer, some clever algorithms and a full scan of the ship's computer systems you could predict any single acceleration vector from a pulse with reasonable accuracy, the Titan must do it as many as 100 consecutive times without error. And you don't have a full map of the ship's computer systems or enough data to model them.

Clarifications on Hekaton computer systems:

I had hoped to cover this more in exposition, but it doesn't look like I'll have the chance.

Hekaton computers are not entirely mechanical--they possess optical circuits for faster calculation. As a whole, the entire computer system of a probe or Orion has the effective digital processing power of a TI-89 calculator (assigned arbitrarily), but it's made up of very specialized analog systems so that value may be misleading. It cannot perform calculations quickly, but it can do many in parallel.

Space is big, travel takes a considerable time and spacecraft need very little actual processing power to function. Often, a specialized analog system is vastly preferred to a digital one of similar caliber.

If there's actually a problem with my technology, godmodding and vague complaints don't help me fix it. Direct me to some resource I can use to design it in a more accurate manner.

I posted a very reasonable defense before, you missed it, I quoted it and clarified, then you ignored it and godmodded anyways. In both this and the previous case, my statements about ship design or even basic astrophysics have been met with alternating accusations of godmodding or simulation-ism.

You've said on several occasions that you don't want me to bother doing a lot of math before each post, but you've ignored my defenses and godmodded, only changing your posts when I've provided mathematical proof.I don't mind doing the math, but I do mind the inconsistent standards. You've been holding me to contradictory standards (any one of which you cannot or will not meet yourself).

The rounds tore through the Hekatonhieres probe, stressing its melting frame beyond the breaking point and stalling its acceleration. Its logic engines ground to a halt, molten, fractured, and irradiated. The Inductor shot past the titan and plowed into the oceans of Nereax, boiling a significant part of the tsunami it created. Coastal areas would flood for weeks to come, but the mountain denizens of Nereax were more or less safe.

With the threat safely passed, the titan tugs which would normally maneuver the Excalibur in Nereax orbit were now called upon to move the debris of the two mission-killed probes into a stellar orbit before they left the system entirely. At this the civilian crews excelled in their massive reaction mass tanks connected to equally massive engines, burning untold fortunes in fuel and propellant to intercept and carry the probes to a stable orbit outside Shepherd's.

The next few weeks were hectic with work, fear, and grief. The power station employees killed in the GASER assault were given state funerals, as they died defending their civilian brothers and sisters. The Admiralty scrambled to determine if these probes were Vathari retaliation for the Shield of Light's excursion and battle. Citizens of the Concordat everywhere went to bed with a mixture of fear and relief in their hearts, knowing that they were not alone.

In later weeks an inquiry was opened into the probes' unsound tactics in the face of a titan, and once the probe wreckage had sufficiently cooled engineers were sent into the gargantuan wrecks to determine how they were crewed. They discovered, with astonishment, three things. The first was that a meal wastepaper from an illegal trash dump aboard the liner Aurora a week earlier had somehow jammed itself into one of the physics engines onboard the probe, making its physics rule calculations quite literally back-of-the-napkin. At this revelation the engineers of the Concordat had a field day, and among such circles a Hekatonhieres or a Hekaton was one who made a fatal misstep due to bad knowledge.

The second was that the probes were called Hekatonhieres, and they were analog-driven by such a complex and detailed computer system that the engineers were scarcely able to catalogue it.

The third was that one of the probe computers was, for all intents and purposes, 'alive' and comatose. The Concordat engineers took great pleasure in fulfilling its prophecy of Prometheus by assaulting its higher functions with painful diagnostics and biopsies, pecking outs its metaphorical liver until its regenerative algorithms slid its stressed cams and gears back into place and reset its higher functioning. When this occurred there was a great joy among the entire engineering garrison, for they could board the helpless probe and again rape its mind with their twisting tools and piercing diagnostics, inflicting endless pain upon the crippled machine in an effort to learn all they could.

For giving the gift of fire to the Nereax, this Prometheus would be tortured forevermore. That gift, meanwhile, would be returned to sender.